The brief was a sacred-grove tree without the clutter — the banyan that anchors so many central-Indian villages, the shade where people sit and cattle rest, but kept to one tree on clean ground instead of a packed canopy. Vertical symmetry does the work a banyan wants anyway: a heavy trunk, a wide crown, and the unmistakable hanging aerial roots, which we drew as strings of marigold beads so they read instantly as banyan and not Mahua. The bead-rows climbing the trunk signal living growth, the leaf-rows in the crown keep the eye moving up, and the small company below — a hut of three seated figures and two cattle — tells you this is a lived-with tree, a meeting place. Everything else stays clean maroon ground.